A brief review of the application of microextraction by packed sorbent for antibiotics analysis from biological, food, and environmental samples

Abstract Currently, sample preparation is the most laborious part of the analytical process, requiring the most time and being susceptible to the most errors. In this context, numerous investigations have focused on the miniaturization of these techniques to reduce work time, costs, and errors. In this regard, microextraction by packed sorbent (MEPS) is a simple, fast, and robust sample preparation technique suitable for easy automation in several analytical systems and is applied to a wide variety of samples. Antibiotics are among the most commonly used drugs; however, their extensive and inappropriate use has garnered significant attention in the environment, human health, and food safety. This brief review is intended to provide an overview of recently reported antibiotic extraction methods based on MEPS, with a special interest in those applied to the analysis of biological, environmental, and food samples. In addition, the sample pretreatment step before extraction by the MEPS device was highlighted, as was the description of the sample-related steps within the MEPS procedure, such as extraction, washing, and elution.